


Sacrificial

by versayce



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Low Chaos (Dishonored), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 17:26:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8293967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/versayce/pseuds/versayce
Summary: How a boy becomes the Outsider, and how the Outsider becomes something more.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Жертвенный](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12993825) by [Gianeya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gianeya/pseuds/Gianeya)



> Two things, real quick. First, this deals with the abuse and ritual sacrifice of a person and other gross stuff, so please read at your own discretion. I'm not a gore enthusiast or anything, but it gets unpleasant. Be warned! Second, I wrote this before D2 came out, and haven't played the game yet but I think some of the stuff I made up here doesn't mesh with canon anymore. I plead ignorance and claim artistic license!

He’s been cold and hungry and hurting for so long that when the darkness takes him it’s a relief. How many men were there, in that room? How many hands touched him? How many days has he been kept in chains, how long did they scrub and perfume and arrange his body until, pink-skinned and raw and aching and pure, they finally let him drown?

The boy doesn’t know. No one speaks to him except to say it will be over soon, and he clings to those words, too scared and drunk from the burning liquid they keep forcing down his throat to ask any questions. And anyway, it isn’t his place. Who is he? No one, probably. It’s hard to remember, when the wreckage of his body is so distracting and his mind is only soft smoke rolling in his head, dark wisps of it escaping whenever he opens his mouth to cry out.

He cries, too. At first the tears are hot, and he startles to feel them on his cheeks, but soon he numbs to them like everything else. Cold, all cold. Metal at his wrists, stone at his back, icy air, and gloved fingers prying his mouth open, spreading his limbs, burrowing into him like fat worms, like he’s dead already.

Oh, let it happen soon, let it be over like they promised.

One last trial – slow and crushing, all the air in him bubbling up. He breathes out underwater until the emptiness inside him squeezes his lungs. He doesn’t try to hold on to any of it. He doesn’t struggle, though some part of him insists he should try. Exhale. Be still. Tears again, but they mix with the saltwater and he can’t tell if he’s crying for want of air or from the cold sting of the sea against his ruined flesh. Salt in his wounds, salt in his eyes, and when he open his mouth, salt on his tongue, in his throat, sore with screaming. He gulps it down, so empty and wrung out and wanting to be filled, to be heavy in a way his body could never manage, so he could sink out of reach of those hands.

Then it’s dark. Black. Not out there, not the water, but right in his eyes. He can’t see. Good, that’s good.

The water takes him into itself and away from them. Their grip on him loosens, fingers slipping slick over wet skin as he’s dragged down and carried off. He wishes never to see anything more with his eyes, never to be touched with cruelty, never to step foot in the world again, and gets his wish.

***

When the Outsider wakes into the Void he knows what he is.

It’s quiet there, and he is alone. He thinks if he could still cry he might have shed a few tears in gratitude. But who does he have to thank? Not them, not the ones who sent him here. What they did to him was worse than death. The Void aches for an instant with the memory of his pain, but already it’s fading, and anyway, it’s only an echo – he can’t feel it.

He can’t feel anything, except for a cool wash of relief.

No time passes. There is no time in the Void. His whole life he’d had to hold himself in, but here he can let himself spill out. Slowly. Only a little at first, while the rest of him knits back together after they tore him apart.

Will they bring him back? Rip him away from this place to visit more abuse on his remains?

He answers his own question – no, they can’t. He knows it just as surely as he knows that he will see them all dead. But not yet. First he has to learn this place and let it know him. He’s never had a home before, but he understands what must be done. This was why they chose him – not just for the secret signs they saw on his body, but for the secrets he knew and could never say. Now he lives that secret knowledge, unfolding into the Void while it seeps inside him, until an equilibrium is reached.

He is full.

Eventually even the echo of his suffering disperses, widening away and smoothing out as though it were nothing but a ripple. He opens his eyes and sees that it was exactly that. He sees so much more besides – farther and sharper and deeper than he ever could while he still lived.

He turns this fathomless gaze on the eight who delivered him into the Void, and they dare to look back so he takes their sight. They say they love him. In their dreams, he reminds them of the visceral shape their love had taken, and when they wake, sobbing, he whispers to them, ‘It will be over soon,’ which is a lie.

The world, he learns, is full of liars. Full of thieves and rapists and murderers, too. So very full of people who are no one at all except when plucked out of their wretchedness to be subjected to cruelty. But full of tenderness too, though it shatters easily. He watches an old man feed his wife, wiping up what dribbles down her chin as though she were a child. When he looks next, three boys kick at a dog until all the bones break and blood froths from its mouth and its twitching nose.

What to do?

One of the eight says, ‘Please, let me help, oh please, oh please,’ writhing in his bed as with a fever. But how? The answer reverberates through the utter silence of the Void. When the man reaches up for him, the Outsider sears his mark into the back of an outstretched hand, and the next night the man breaks the legs of the boys who kicked the dog. He steals into a rich man’s house and takes a few pieces of gold, leaving half for the old man and his crippled wife. Half he keeps for himself, and when he breaks the boys’ legs their cries make his blood rush right to his cock.

It is not what the Outsider expected.

But the first one proves so interesting that he marks the rest of the eight, even the ones who run from him, who cower like uncomprehending animals. To some he gives back their sight, though darkened. Others are good with a blade – he knows this from experience, has felt their skill express itself on his body – so he makes them fast, and precise, and lucky. Time is nothing in the void. He lets some of them make it nothing in the world too, but briefly.

The eight call these gifts, call them powers. They think the Outsider made them strong. Now he puts aside the humiliating pain he’s been bringing into their dreams, and comes with questions instead: will you visit your neighbour, who goes to his daughter’s bed while his wife sleeps? Should the slave-trader be allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains? Should they be allowed to keep their lives?

At first, he watches with eagerness, but inevitably dull patterns emerge. These are the same men who brutalized and killed the child he had been for an arcane purpose, and they see this night-time work as a continuation of that ritual. He scoffs. He admonishes. They grovel, but can see no meaning in what they do for him aside from the esoteric, and occasionally the carnal or monetary.

Disgusting.

But then – one of the Marked goes to kill a man who poisoned an uncle for an early inheritance, and instead of exacting justice he only gets himself run through. Another is overwhelmed by guard dogs. Torn to shreds. The Outsider watches, especially the way his dirty fingers stiffen with pain. He appears to the dying man right at the end, to watch the life drain from his eyes. It makes him smile to see it and he goes on smiling for a while.

Only six of them now, and it doesn’t feel right, so he finds two others, women this time. Lovers. He wants to remember love, but watching them he realizes that he never knew much about it to begin with.

He learns.

They do incredible things with the marks he gives them, those two, then they tear themselves apart.

Two more, then. One kills himself. Three gone, but there always have to be eight. And so the years drip away. When the last of those who drowned him dies, something in him is set free. He hears a whale sing that night, and the Void fills with the sound of it. No need for quiet anymore.

The Void also fills with debris from the world, the more he watches. No need for emptiness, either. Beautiful things, and ugly ones too, but always twisted somehow, because everything has a twist. A dark corner in everyone’s heart.

Each one of his Marked is interesting. Each one of them a disappointment.

***

‘Hello, Corvo,’ the Outsider says, and the eyes that look back at him remind him of someone he used to be.

***

‘Come find me, Corvo,’ the Outsider says, and Corvo comes. He hunts down shrines with a single-minded dedication that would border on fanaticism if the Outsider thought he cared for them as anything other than a means to an end. It’s the runes he’s after, so he can grow stronger. So he can save Emily.

But sometimes Corvo lingers. He runs a hand over the purple velvet draped around the altar. He hesitates for a few endless moments before reaching for the rune. He stays after the Outsider has gone.

***

‘You fascinate me,’ the Outsider says, and he thinks he sees a shiver run through Corvo.

***

The world is not kind, but Corvo is. He tries to help, he holds back, he torments himself with useless guilt. Somehow, he manages to salvage the one thing he cares for most without destroying himself in the process.

The Outsider scrutinizes each of his choices, and something stirs in the dark water that surrounds him in the Void. For thousands of years he’s been drowning, but then Corvo does something unpredictable and the Outsider takes a breath, and another, gasping for air with every one of Crovo’s surprising little mercies.

He’s waited for this.

***

‘Farewell, Corvo,’ the Outsider says, when it’s done.

And Corvo says, ‘No.’

No?

Corvo touches him, without cruelty. It isn’t easy to stop from lashing out. It isn’t easy to allow it. But the Outsider strains against the lessons of his own brief life, all but forgotten, and against the intervening millennia of tedium. He allows it.

Corvo is special.

‘Am I?’ Corvo asks. His voice is a brittle thing, filled with tenderness. Tenderness shatters too easily, yes, but here it lasts. It persists in the touch of Corvo’s hand, and when he comes closer, in the touch of his lips.

The Void sings, and Corvo pulls away, trying to cover his ears against the terrible sound. The Outsider quiets for his sake and pulls him back, suddenly hungry, empty where for the longest time he’d been full. The Heart he gave Corvo, molded by his own hands, beats and beats. No, it isn’t the Heart – it’s his own heart. The pain of its sudden awakening is incredible and it grips him fast, just how he remembered it, even after all this time.

His skin is raw again, all over, and Corvo’s hands skim across it. Tender, so tender, reopening all the old wounds, then soothing them away.

Beautiful, Corvo.

Corvo kisses him for it. He could not have predicted this, this reassertion of his flesh. Will it diminish him? Will it rip him away from the place he loves best?

It doesn’t. But what is the place he loves best now? Is it the Void, or is it here, beneath the solid press of Corvo’s body? It is both. He said farewell, so accustomed to the necessity of lies, but he could not have let him go.

He is full again, with Corvo inside him.

This was what they were after, he thinks – the ones who wore him down to nothing, the Marked who chased the burning in their blood, the worshippers who came to him on their knees. Oh, but they had it all wrong. Corvo shows him how to do it right, fucks him in the bright blue timelessness until he feels that he might lose himself again.

And then, what will he become?


End file.
